'How I Met Your Mother' recap: See The Future They Will

Previously on this snoozer of a season: Ted and Robin both fled their apartment, turning over the keys to Lily and Marshall who were eager to flee their free house in the suburbs for a free two-bedroom Manhattan walk-up. Mr. Mosby and Ms. Scherbatsky also briefly contemplated rekindling their romance before ultimately decided to remain just friends. (Thank goodness.) And finally, Barney fell for a stripper named Quinn, who played the player before deciding that she kinda liked him back, even though no good can possibly come from their relationship. And that's pretty much all that's happened this year! We told you that it's been a snoozer. Clearly, another member of the Eriksen clan needs to die. We vote for that shiftless layabout Marcus.

Anyway, on with the season's 21st episode, "Trilogy Time" in which the three guys sit down for their umpteenth viewing of the Holy Trinity a.k.a. the original
Star Wars trilogy. (Because watching people on TV watching movies on their TVs always makes for thrilling television.) Before we get to that though, we're treated to a brief expository scene with Lily, Robin and Barney in which we discover that Barney and Quinn are indeed cohabitating as they promised (threatened?) at the end of the previous episode. Apparently, things are going really great -- except for the fact that Barney now needs to go out on the street every night to fart and refuses to replace his coffee mugs with hers as that would mean he wouldn't be asserting "his dominance as a man," a Cro-Magnon sentiment that earns him an instant rebuke from the two women at the table (as it did with Quinn when he said the same thing to her earlier in the evening). Felled by their words, Caveman Barney retreats to his pal Ted's new man cave... where Ted and Marshall promptly attack him for his insensitivity towards the opposite sex. Before Barney can act on his threat to go to the Y for schvitz, Ted declares it "Trilogy Time," the point at which they have to watch all three
Star Wars movies back to back. (By the way, the fact that Ted holds up the Blu-ray
Star Wars set indicates that he's finally upgraded his home entertainment system since ditching his old apartment. Hopefully, he threw his VHS player out instead of leaving Lily and Marshall stuck with a now-useless piece of technology.)

As we're informed via flashback, the concept of "Trilogy Time" dates back to the year 2000 when Ted and Marshall were just a pair of dorky nerf herders desperately worried about failing their Econ final. (And a quick note here: 2000 was the year after
The Phantom Menace came out, at which point the whole
Star Wars franchise had taken a massive credibility hit. Really, college-age Ted and Marshall should have been burning their brains out on repeat viewings of
The Matrix.) In order to relieve some of the tension, Ted decides that they should watch Episodes IV-VI back-to-back, something he hasn't done for five years. This length of time shocks Marshall, who insists that you've got to keep the gap between viewings limited to three-years or "the Dark Side wins." So he and Ted make a pact to "tril it up" every three years, no matter what. That flashback leads into a flashforward, where the college kids envision their post-grad future in which Ted's a successful architect with awesome hair and a girlfriend that looks an awful lot like Robin, Marshall is a successful lawyer with a cool mustache and Lily is already knocked up with the first of four planned kids. (In a nice touch, in this awesome new future they still sleep on their old dorm room bunk beds.) Then we cut to the
actual 2003, where things obviously haven't gone the way they imagined them. Sitting down to watch the trilogy again, they mentally leap ahead to the year 2006... you get the idea.